The Heart Goes Last

The teddy bears that female inmates at Positron handknit by the crateful represent lost innocence. At first, Charmaine enjoys the camaraderie of the knitting circle and learning a new skill while incarcerated. But she quickly becomes bored and inattentive while working, and when she’s forced to spend an extra month in the prison, the knitting circle becomes a site of alienation and suspicion rather than companionship. Her changing relationship to the chore of knitting bears illustrates a dawning (if largely subconscious) awareness that she’s there to serve the interests of Positron, not the other way around.

Unbeknownst to Charmaine, the bears are an accessory for the very popular “kiddybot” models produced by Positron’s Possibilibots sex robot division. When Stan learns that the company is actually selling a product that appears to condone pedophilia, he is horrified. But the other factory workers—Budge, Derek, Kevin, Gary, and Tyler—offer rationales for the practice, saying that maybe it will prevent the victimization of children rather than tacitly encouraging it. They turn a blind eye because they don’t know what else to do. But the book insists that the bears cannot retain any innocence whatsoever when it reveals that Veronica, a volunteer forced to undergo a procedure designed to sexually bond her to a high-paying client, has accidentally imprinted on the bear instead. And once someone has seen how the system works, they can’t unsee it. They can either willingly turn a blind eye (like the Possibilibots guys) or do something about it (like Stan, though his participation in Jocelyn’s plan is at least partly coerced).